SQLite FTS could have done this a decade ago. We've had good local search capabilities for two decades and they either been underused or abandoned (e.g. Google Desktop, Yahoo! Search). This may be a reasonable projection of where AI is headed. You can do a lot locally but there is too much incentive to centralize around cloud infrastructure, then the privacy concerns make that prohibitive and we end up with what feels like a false choice of cloud or bust.
Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?
I think that's a bit strong of an assertion. How many people use copilot daily under an enterprise agreement? I don't necessarily disagree in spirit, especially given the questionable data sanitization around the recent Navier-Stokes announcement, but most companies disclose huge amounts of data regularly to hopefully-trusted third parties. I think the internet -- and a good share of the world's commerce -- would grind to a halt if we suddenly stopped. Setting up, securing, and maintaining local models for even a small user base is non-trivial and there is way more demand than supply for that skillset right now.
Exactly. It’s still just software, which someone programmed and deployed to do specifically dangerous/malicious things. I feel like we already have legislation and case law surrounding this.
Does mathematics still have a practical impact without humans in the loop? I don't think there's one single answer to that question, but I think it's worth considering exactly what that impact may be.
Tech companies are as much the topic of this post as AI, I think that's the immediacy.
To a significant extent, the pursuit of mathematics research is a pursuit of human understanding of mathematics, without knowing where it might lead, or whether it might lead anywhere at all. I don't see how the motivation for that goes away on its own, but the institution supporting it is certainly threatened by the potential loss of grant money and graduate student applications.
> Does mathematics still have a practical impact without humans in the loop?
There's a single answer to that question: yes, math very much has an impact without humans in the loop.
Math has a lot of applications, and those applications don't care whether eg the new faster matrix multiplication algorithm was found and proven correct by a machine or a meatbag.
We're way into diminishing returns in matrix multiplication, and being clever about ALUs and cache layout is likely to dwarf any asymptotic improvements you're going to find. Any better examples of improvements in the last decade?
The main situation I can think of where better calculations have a really visible effect is video and image compression, and that stuff is very far away from mathematical proof territory.
Wow that's a terrible paraphrase! I asked about algorithms where recent/ongoing improvements were important and they already replied with a list.
If you tell someone they can't use a matrix multiplication with better asymptotic performance than n^2.3755 from 1990 they're going to shrug and not care.
As the US has offshored manufacturing, the number of patents issued for those processes has fallen. Innovation occurs where the foundational understanding is applied; they arise from a desire to do the required work more efficiently.
Similarly in math, attempting to solve a problem leads to new questions. IF you actually do the work.
You need to have done enough of the work to know what the correct next question are, or you need to rely on AI for everything.
so you're 100% sure that AI will solve every intellectual problem in the future, since as long as that's not the case, it's us who need to ask the questions. I don't know man, I wouldn't bet on that. What if we end up being wrong and then there is not research community?
I don't understand what you're proposing then. We can ask AI to solve practical problems of interest (making a computer faster for instance), but I'd say no one really believes that this is an unlimited resource. At some point we'll reach a plateau, and then AI will be an important tool but to continue advancing we'll need someone to ask the right questions.
What is 'asking the right questions' supposed to mean?
I am saying that applications supplied and supply an inexhaustible amount of good problems and questions to consider. Purely theoretical concerns also supply some questions, but even if that well dries up for some reason, applications persist.
Isn’t the implication that the vulnerability had already been found and exploited instead of reported to Google, because its value to Google was so low? Whoever found it originally had more incentive to sell it on the grey/black market. Or is the incentive structure truly different for vulnerabilities discovered to be already in the wild?
Some exploit hunters sell strictly to the grey/black market to avoid opsec issues. If you're selling on both, you're more likely to be identified by both.
It’s Foucault’s interpretation of the panopticon. If we know that we may be watched — and punished — we self-police into following the norm, even if we do not know when we are being watched or that someone is necessarily monitoring us individually.
When I was a kid in the 80s none of this was an issue and I was free to roam. Starting in the 90s this became an issue and not only will parents not let their kids roam but the kids themselves have less interest because the norm is to stay in or only go out when supervised. You know you are doing something slightly wrong. It only takes occasional reminders like this to reinforce the rule, once established.
Same, this is like blogspam in the days of old that doesn't add anything to the original content and is just there to generate revenue for this site. The linked posts are better and per HN guidelines the toplink should probably be changed to one of those.
This line of thinking diminishes the real struggles autistic people face. Not everyone is autistic, and it's not just a quirky set of traits. I do believe society could be better arranged for people who for whatever reason don't conform to the overculture norms, so we could talk about disability along the axis of how society privileges or disadvantages certain individuals.
The concern is that autism as a rigorous category may be useless, but that doesn't mean that autistic people are suddenly neurotypical -- a term that is more politically than scientifically oriented. People who are not autistic broadly are allistic, to be precise with language. They may be neurodivergent in other ways.
I'm reminded of an anecdote I heard once from a psych(ologist/iatrist?) that goes something like: if you think you hear voices in your head, but the voices tell you to go to bed on time and drink plenty of water, you don't need a diagnosis/treatment.
The point is that a lot of things, when it comes to humans and their brains, is judged first based as to whether or not it negatively affects your life. Think of how we define addiction.
General doesn’t mean it applies to literally everyone. If autism turns out to be a specific condition that is e.g. the result of abnormal neuron pruning during early development, it could have a wide array of symptoms, but that understanding may someday lead to genetic treatments for sever cases, better early childhood interventions, etc.
I do think that the current ASD umbrella as written in the DSM is so broad as to seem nearly meaningless when take in isolation. It’s not meant to be in isolation however, it’s defined first and foremost as a disorder, so the symptoms need to cross some threshold of tolerable. It’s also associated with a growing body of research as to how nervous system development can cause related clusters of symptoms.
Is autism as we understand it scientifically accurate? Probably about as much as anything hovering in the intersection of social sciences and medicine. It does have some predictive power. If you meet the diagnostic criteria for autism you are likely to have certain comorbidities for example. Having certain autistic traits are good predictors of certain outcomes later in life. And we do have better therapies especially for young people than we have in the past.
The fact that people can have non-overlapping clusters of traits and still be autistic does seem problematic. It may not be the right model. Just my $.02, I’m not the autism researcher in this convo, but I am autistic :)
> But different autistic people struggle with different things, in different ways.
Different asthmatic people struggle with different things, in different ways too, but it's useful to have a general diagnosis umbrella to cover those who have asthma even though symptoms and effective treatments may vary.
Work is ongoing to get better defined categories for autistic people, but for now at least we've got a category for people that match a broad set of traits/symptoms/challenges to work from.
The problem is that the set of problems is very broadly defined, changes over time, varies from person to person, it's often impossible to obiectively test.
Can't it be that a neurotypical person is bothered by some autistic triggers? Would that make them neurodivergent? How many of those triggers do you need to have to be under that umbrella? 1? 5? 20?
It is indeed called a spectrum, and I think it gets so fuzzy at the edges that the only way to define where it starts or ends is purely arbitrarly chosen.
It's a bimodal distribution. There are people with few of these traits lightly, and people with many or with a few severe ones. Not so many in between. This already makes it an interesting line to draw.
No so different things, and not so different ways. The "if you met one, you met one" is overplayed. Yeah, they have different interests and might have different comorbidities, doesn't mean they don't just have different core issues that are merely expressed differently (e.g. hates jeans vs hates wool sweaters or hates noises, but underlying both is sensory sensitivity).
The fact that they don't is why diagnostic tests exist and work.
That's a good example: they hate certain things, and are ok with others.
Depending on what you "hate" your life and disability can vastly drastically. Be it eye contact, clothing, certain foods, or the inability to change your routine or environment at all, or to even leave the house alone.
>The concern is that autism as a rigorous category may be useless, but that doesn't mean that autistic people are suddenly neurotypical
IDK. I'm diagnosed as autistic, but I've become a bit less attached to that label in recent years. Like, I do struggle with eye contact, excessive noise, and social situations. I'm not going to say that I'm just a normal guy, but I do think that there's a wide spectrum here that encompasses everybody. I don't buy the idea that autism is some special category of people that are totally unlike neurotypicals. Instead, it's just one side of the spectrum, with neurotypicals on the other end, and an ambiguous group in the middle[0]. I think that once society becomes more accepting of neurodiversity, we're going to stop getting so hung up on labels like "autistic" and "neurotypical" and accept that there's a lot of nuance in the human condition.
[0] In reality, this spectrum would be multi-dimensional, but I'm choosing to describe it as a 1D line for illustrative purposes.
When I first considered my condition, I was looking around and was trying to mentally label people as neurotypical/neurodivergent.
After a few years, I started labeling more and more people as neurodivergent, because I could notice more subtle hints. Now, I instead just try to figure out how far on the spectrum everyone is, to know how the relationship dynamic will be like.
But that's the thing, sight and blind can be easily defined.
"Autism" can't, most of the people live undiagnosed, many mask the symptoms unknowingly, specialists can't even tell exactly if someone is autistic or not, many people are misdiagnosed, or diagnosed as neurotypical by some specialists and neurodivergent by others.
I don't think the ratio is that far towards neurotypicals as it was previously believed. I think that, as most things in life, it's a gaussian distribution.
I’m not sure why you were downvoted. I have to use Windows for work. The barrier to entry is simply lower for many system administrators and users alike. The homogeneity of a Windows rollout is extremely attractive. You are going to have a hard sell getting your accounting team and receptionist onto Linux. Your developers will complain and make do. I love complaining about Windows!
Their sandbox just sucked, the agent found a route through artifactory which was also connected to the internet. After the agent breached it, they put it back in the patched sandbox and it found its way out with another artifactory exploit — which was still connected to the internet.
No attempt was made at an actual air gap as far as I can tell. OpenAI is dangerous and irresponsible and doing a lot of pearl clutching over how their cybersecurity agent is doing cybersecurity things.
Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?
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